Connecting with the relentlessly helpful John Espirian

Recognise this face? It’s the face of LinkedIn helpfulness. And if you use LinkedIn on a regular basis, you are bound to have seen this chap pop up on your newsfeed, imparting his practical and useful LinkedIn-related guidance to anyone and everyone who has a LinkedIn query, problem or dilemma.

John Espirian

A self-confessed ‘LinkedIn nerd’, John Espirian is also an experienced technical copywriter and author of Content DNA, a book about how ‘staying true to your shape can help you build a business presence that’s noticed, remembered and preferred.’

John had secretly been on my ‘interviewee for this site wish list’ for a while now, and I’ve finally got round to prodding and poking him with my questions.

Here’s what he told me…

Q. Would it be fair to say that you didn’t initially plan to have a career in content?

I definitely didn't plan to have a career in content creation. My background is as a software and hardware tester for the internet service provision industry, and I later became as a quality assurance manager.

The transferable skill here was in knowing how to ask the right questions to work out how things function and then to communicate those ideas to people who would otherwise struggle to understand how technology works. When I was made redundant from my desk job and couldn't get an interview much less a job, I decided to turn this transferable skill into a self-employed business, which became Espirian technical copywriting. That was in late 2009, and I haven't looked back since.

Q. You’re known as 'relentlessly helpful' and someone who knows a great deal about LinkedIn - how did that knowledge and reputation evolve?

My deep dive into LinkedIn happened at the start of 2017, but that was preceded by a few years of trying lots of different social networks, none of which generated any business. It's only when I came to the now obvious realisation that someone working in B2B should invest most of their social media time in a platform that most often serves B2B clients that things started to work for me.

Even then, nothing happened for the first nine months of me being highly active on LinkedIn. My ‘relentlessly helpful’ personal brand came about through a chance moment when I was speaking on-stage at a conference and was asked an unscripted question. I used the phrase ‘relentlessly helpful’ in my response without thinking about it, but then I reflected on that in the following days and it led me to start developing my personal brand around this idea.

I've since hammered the message home in all of the content I've created, including in my book, Content DNA. There is a definite downside to this, because some people interpret ‘relentlessly helpful’ as meaning ‘gullible doormat’. Thankfully, I'm getting better at pushing away the time-wasters and the selfish users.

I always say that I'm interested in serving only those people who have good hearts and minds.

Q. How have you personally found 'work life' since the pandemic began? And has it somehow changed the way that you're using LinkedIn now?

Honestly, I've seen no real change. I've already been working from home for more than a decade, and I could barely be any more active on LinkedIn than I am now!

There has been a slight decrease in visibility on LinkedIn, but I think that's a consequence of so many people joining the platform in the last year. It's inevitable that organic reach will be restricted somewhat when there are more people vying for attention. That's all the more reason to build a personal brand now, because the same opportunity might not be around in five years’ time – at least not without some support from advertising spend.

I still love the organic visibility of LinkedIn right now, because it means that I can put my content out for free, and have it reach people all around the world without having to pay a penny for ads.

Q. Where or who do you look to most often for inspiration and industry news?

I learn about trends from Twitter, but my more substantial learning tends to be done via the medium of audio. I'm an avid listener of podcasts, audiobooks and now, as of the last couple of weeks, the audio discussions that happen on Clubhouse.

Q. Lastly, do you think technical copywriting will move on in some way, this year?

I think communication is going to become an evermore multimedia discipline. An eye for design and an understanding of the power of audio and video would help copywriters to better communicate their messages and hence offer their customers are more powerful way to get close to their audiences.

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